PREMESH Chandran laughs when asked if he ever imagined Malaysiakini would become what it is today: the award-winning and leading online media in Malaysia that reaches over 300,000 readers per day in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil. “It grew to be something much bigger than what we expected it to be,” the news portal’s [...]

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak recently said the government would not suppress cyberspace but instead engage this global change. But how do we square his remarks with the government’s plans to extend the PPPA’s reach online, and their other verbal attacks on internet expression?

THE Penang government has come under fire from Umno for allegedly distributing government aid for senior citizens from “haram” sources. But is Umno missing something in its own argument? And whether money from gaming activities was really distributed to Muslims or not, is such aid really “haram” in Islam?

WHY is the government charging someone for writing a satirical piece? On 2 Sep 2010, Irwan Abdul Rahman, a Malay Mail executive editor was charged over a blog posting entitled “TNB to sue WWF over earth hour.” Irwan’s posting on his website Nose4news was below a huge banner with the words “The truth is out [...]

A POLICE report was lodged recently by a society, of which the prime minister is the patron, against the Bar Council’s MyConstitution campaign. The society said the MyConstitution booklets were “seditious” because it explained how the constitution could be amended. But doesn’t the constitution expressly state that it can be amended? And since when did educating the public about the constitution constitute a crime?

KARPAL Singh. Lim Guan Eng. Raja Petra Kamaruddin. Wong Chin Huat. These individuals have all been arrested or charged under Malaysia’s draconian Sedition Act. The Act was passed in 1948, at the height of the British colonial government’s struggle against the communists. But more than 60 years later, the wide-ranging and subjective law is still being used, whenever it’s convenient, to silence political opponents.